This is a story about star quality...

Hey! Is that Nick Grant pitching a Dragons Den panel at Cambridge Union? Isn't that the same podium in Cambridge where UK prime ministers and US presidents have wowed crowds? Isn't that the same podium where the world's best and brightest have stood? Yes. Yes it is.

If you're into astrology, you should know I'm a Leo. Apparently this means that I adore being the centre of attention. However, I've always had somebody yelling louder than me for the spotlight to be directed onto them.

Growing up, my dad had this horse-shit narrative about how cool he was because he took drugs. My childhood achievements were nothing compared to the amount of drugs and alcohol he could consume. Growing up, life was all about worshipping how smart he was for obtaining and taking intoxicating substances. Woo!

My longest relationship, with the girl who my friends affectionately called "the poison dwarf" was dominated by her tantrums if the attention was diverted from her. She completely ruined our joint birthday and engagement party, simply because her unpleasant nature had brought her few friends in life, and the event was mainly my friends, despite my efforts to help her encourage people from her own social circle to attend.

OK, I'm not that humble, but I'm not that arrogant either. If I'm bigging myself up, it's because it's a defence mechanism because I've been dragged down by my own parents, bullies and an abusive ex-wife. I've had a rough fucking ride, so let me have this one, OK?

I haven't lost perspective. I'm well aware that my achievements amount to nothing. I never got so much as a "well done" out of my parents for everything I've ever accomplished. It's tough fucking going, living life with insufferable cunts who just want to see you fail.

Normally, when things are going well, people are supportive and want to help you to continue to achieve your potential in life. Not so, in most of my story to date.

Often times startup founders receive their initial funding from friends and family. My friends contributed generously to my ambitions to build a profitable business, and they were repaid with the dividends from the company. My own parents saw no potential in what I was doing, even though billionaire investors took me under their wing and agreed to help my co-founder and I to build a valuable business. My ex-wife took particularly cruel delight in watching my dreams get shattered.

Yes, I'm subject the fatal flaw of a little too much desire to be loved and liked. When an acting coach suggested that we try my co-founder out to see if he was any better at delivering an investor pitch, I was mortified by the idea that I wouldn't get my moment of fame. For sure, I'm subject to big-headedness and delusions of grandeur as much as the next person, but in a way, I can argue that I deserved my little headlining moment, because I had always been kicked to the sidelines by self-centred parents and partners.

You know what? Give your kids their moment of fame. Let your kids bask in a bit of adoration. Don't hoover it all up for yourselves. You know what your input was? You had sex. Well done. Gold star. But that's nothing that every couple didn't already do for hundreds of millions of years. All you did was do what your fucking body was programmed to do. Now get the fuck out of the spotlight and let your kid enjoy their little moment. Your time is over. It's no longer your chance to shine. It's your moment to tell your kid well done, and that you're proud of them.

Butt the fuck out and acknowledge a good performance when you see one. Congratulate your fucking kid on their hard work and try and pretend like you're pleased, even if you're too fucking drug addled and self centred to even see straight.

You know what else? I'm fucking taking this one. I'm fucking taking this moment to tell myself well done, because nobody in my family is going to. My ex-wife isn't going to. Basically, the people who mattered most to me when some fairly monumental stuff happened to me in my life couldn't have given two shits about anything that wasn't to do with them and their selfish fucking world, so I'm going to relive this little moment and applaud myself.

Well fucking done me.

It ain't fucking easy battling for your moment of fame. It ain't fucking easy getting that chance, and then performing when it matters. It ain't fucking easy at all. And what's it all for if the people who you think care about you couldn't give a toss?

Well, guess what? I had that limelight. Not because I was a drug-taking fucktard like my parents, but because I worked hard to get that opportunity. I had that opportunity, not because I demanded it and stole it from my child, but because I wanted to impress, because I wanted to do something great.

Isn't that awful, that my parents made my entire childhood about them, shoving me into a dark corner so they could harvest all the ill-gotten attention? Isn't that awful, that my longest relationship was dominated by an abusive partner who demanded that the spotlight was always directed on her, and abused me to the point that I lost my confidence and became a withdrawn and shattered version of my former self?

Bygones. Regrets. Yes.

I'm just telling the story because nobody else is going to tell it. If you ask my parents they'll tell you that I was an evil waste of space who never achieved anything, and that's plain wrong.

This is me sticking up for myself. This is me fighting against the complete collapse of my self esteem that will render me hopelessly suicidally depressed. This is my defence mechanism.

I'm sorry if this comes across as arrogant or self-centred. I hope it comes across in the context of my desperately low sense of self-worth, given how I've been treated most of my life. I need a little pride and self confidence to be able to continue.

God damn, I'm so low right now.

Tags: #startup #suicide #depression #selfesteem #parents #childhood #divorce

This is a story about responsibility...

What a difference a day can make. 24 little hours. Now imagine that your life is nonstop round-the-clock bullshit perpetrated against you because you're trapped into a death spiral by people who profess to actually giving a shit about human life.

A great deal of preparations have gone into preparing the excuses why our own sons, brothers, nephews and other male members of our society are abandoned to a slow death ending in suicide. There's a lot of arse covering that has happened.

I'm an expert in arse covering.

I've seen arse covering throughout my career. I know it when I see it. I can smell bullshit and arse covering from a million miles away. I know when some utter dead-wood piece of shit is just covering their arse. I know when total cunts are throwing their colleagues under the fucking bus.

From my very earliest memories of childhood, I can remember my parents getting their excuses ready for why they were such utter cunts. Apparently I was a difficult child. It wasn't their fault. Apparently I used to cry in my cot out of spite. Apparently I used to shit my nappies to deliberately inconvenience my mum & dad. Apparently my very arrival on this earth was all part of the devil's plan to ruin my ma & pa's drug taking binge. Apparently if you were to shave my head you'd see the numerals 666 on my skull.

So, I have no doubt that my parents have covered their own conscience from the very day that I was born. I have no doubt that their own drug fuelled paranoia has meant that they've spent plenty of time getting their story straight. No your honour, he was always just evil you see, they'll say. Two against one. My word against theirs. Cunts.

If a plant was withered and dying, we would be in little doubt that it had been under-watered, perhaps had insufficient daylight or the soil was not very nutritious. Only in the madness of the world do we declare children to be evil little shits. Only in the folly of drug-addled parenthood would two grown adults believe that their child was a satanic agent sent to ruin their buzz. Cunts.

So, shame on them, not shame on me.

I've taken enough shame over the years. I've taken an unfair proportion of blame. I've taken an unreasonable amount of responsibility for my own birth. I've been saddled witth the debt of my parents' guilt and bullshit, but it's not my burden to carry. I'm fucked off with it all.

Shame on you, those who would tell me I'm a bad person from the day I formed my very earliest memories. Shame on you, those who would make me feel like a fucking inconvenience my whole life.

I'm sorry, not sorry, if I ever stole the limelight from you during your drug binges. I'm sorry, not sorry, that I ever deprived you of precious cash to spend on booze and drugs. I'm sorry, not sorry, that there was a tiny amount of time investment needed to palm me off on the state, so that I could be raised by my teachers and my friends parents.

You got a free fucking ride, in replicating your genes into me, but this is where the buck stops. You don't get to clone your selfish fucking genes any further. I have no intention of ever allowing the lineage of your selfish fucked up character traits to be perpetrated on humanity for any further generations. You absolutely awful people.

There's a sickness inside me, in the genes that I carry, passed on from lazy, arrogant, paranoid and selfish, self-centred arseholes who care about nobody but themselves and their drug taking, but this is where it ends. This is the end of the line. This is where somebody takes a stand.

Do I have anything to be ashamed of?

My parents constantly shamed me. Nothing was ever good enough. Unsatisfied with me, my parents took further steps to humiliate me and destroy my self esteem and happiness. Repeatedly, my very identity was violated and destroyed by the self-centred cunts who ruled my life until the day I could finally escape their clutches. There is nothing I want to give my parents credit for, except my unshakable belief that their genes should die as soon as possible.

Taking responsibility is about not perpetrating more pain and suffering in the world. Shame on you, my parents.

Do I have things to be ashamed of? Of course.

Have I paid my debts? Many, many, many times over, and now I'm exhausted.

Do I die in shame? Not at all. I couldn't have done any more in the circumstances. There's no pride, but I know that there's nothing left to give, and I maintained my integrity.

To perpetuate the misery that was inflicted upon me, would be a crime. The stain that my parents have left on the world must come to an end. In their old age, they'll pass away peacefully in their sleep. When I'm dead too, the nightmare is more or less over.

Eating poison to hurt your enemy is foolish, but my very existence serves to support this bullshit notion that children fucked up their drug binge, and they were cursed with an evil child sent by satan himself. I know it's ridiculous, but I can't take the risk of this horse shit continuing.

I'm so sick and tired of being told to live in shame, when I have little to be ashamed of.

I stand by my sins. I welcome the end.

Tags: #parents #childhood #suicide

This is a story about surprises...

We are very keen to jump to conclusions. So many of us read the headline and assume that we know the story. Surprisingly large numbers of people will comment on a social media post without even clicking through and reading the content. It's so easy to walk in on a chapter of somebody's life and assume that you know the whole story.

Mental health problems? Blah blah blah... go and see a doctor, get some happy pills and all your problems will go away. No need to hear the end of that story. All problems can be medicalised and will be just fine if you just speak to the right specialist. For sure there are people out there who deal with this kind of stuff. Not my problem. Go away.

Drugs? Say no more. We know how this ends. Yes, your story is bound to involve selling your own grandmother to unscrupulous rogues in order to raise money for your dirty habit, and basically you're filthy scum and don't even deserve to have your story heard. GET OUT OF MY EYES AND EARS and go away.

Nervous breakdown? Why not take up yoga? Stop and smell the flowers. Do cartwheels in a field. Other people have things so much harder than you so I don't even know what you're complaining about. Everybody's life is terrible. Get a grip on yourself. It's all in your head. Why don't you exercise more? Salsa dancing? Homeopathy? I'll write the end of your story for you: all your problems went away and you were magically transported to the land of milk & honey. The end. Go away.

Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

Workaholic? You should try sitting around on your arse on a continous jolly holiday. Why don't you retire or take up knitting? If you force yourself to smile, you'll suddenly feel much happier about everything. Take some deep breaths. Have you thought about shutting down the system and rebooting? Failing that, you can reformat the hard-disk and reinstall the operating system.

Isolated, lonely and suicidal? Chin up. Look on the bright side. Suicide is so selfish. Suicide just leaves a big mess for other people to clean up. You're so attention seeking. Cry for help. If you were serious you'd have done it already. Go away.

We are being told that problems are all in our heads, and the only person holding us back from achieving our full potential is ourself. This is utter bullshit. There are so many barriers to entry and things that are holding us back. Life is more complicated than every self-help book, motivational quote and trite soundbite that sounds inspirational but is actually really depressingly useless.

People who are happy and fulfilled are the ones who go to the gym, cook organic freshly prepared meals, don't smoke, don't drink, do yoga, meditate, smell the flowers, swim in the ocean and generally swan around having a lovely time. Doing those things is not the cure or the answer to anything. Doing those things is a symptom of the fact that your life is pretty bloody perfect. There's a reason why people are depressed, stressed and anxious, and it's not that they haven't done enough yoga.

The yoga can wait. It really can. I'm far too worried about earning enough money to pay my rent, bills, food, transport and other cost of living expenses, while also keeping myself washed, clean shaven, hair cut, nails clipped, nose and ear hair trimmed, and with enough clean clothes that are not completely threadbare in order to have a reasonably professional appearance. I'm far too worried about servicing my debts, staying on top of my taxes, keeping up with the administrative headaches that our bureaucratic government forces upon us, as well as turning up at work and keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. The yoga can wait. I'm far too preoccupied with my soul-destroying job that makes me suicidally desperate for escape, but escape is eternally just out of reach.

So you're going to quit your job and go travelling? What about your kids? What about your pets? What about your family? What about money? Oh, you don't have any money? Well you could save some up, couldn't you? Oh, you've been trying to save some up, but you're having a crisis NOW? Well, can't you just postpone your crisis, perhaps for another 30 years?

So you're going to quit your job and find a new career? What about your rent? What about your bills? What about all the money you need to pay for tuition and certification? What about the money you're going to need to fund yourself when you're looking for an entry-level job? What about the huge drop in income you're going to have, having no experience in your new career? What about the tent that you're going to buy because clearly you're going to go homeless if you lose your source of income?

So you're going to leave the city and get away from the rat race? What about the fact you don't have any friends or family anywhere else? What about the fact that there are no opportunities anywhere else? What about the fact that you've got nowhere to live, no car, no van, no tent, no cardboard box?

Oh yes, the world is stuffed full of opportunities to avoid the sources of stress that are destroying you. Yeah, sure it's all in your head and you should just imagine what you want to be, snap your fingers and it will come true. How's about a ballerina, footballer, pop singer, astronaut, fireman, deep sea diver? Yeah. The only thing holding you back is YOU you stupid dummy. How silly of you.

Or you could just do some yoga. Yoga fixes everything.

Here's the image that you had to click through to see, and scroll all the way down here. I hope the reward was worth it. Well done. Gold star.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction #career #depression

This is a story about getting rich or dying trying...

People come to London seeking their fortune. I went to Ireland seeking my salvation. In a way, I kinda found it.

My life had fallen apart. I had lost a lucrative contract with Barclays through no fault of my own (the guy who terminated my contract was then sacked because of his stupid decision) as well as breaking up with my girlfriend, being evicted from my apartment in Swiss Cottage (again, through no fault of my own) and had once again found myself homeless and unemployed. Many friends took sides during my breakup, and I ended up suddenly alone.

It was January, in the depths of a depressing British winter. No job, no money, no friends, no girlfriend, no nothing. I was fucked.

A friend who I met in the summer, when I first became homeless, had returned to the emerald isle. He had generously made an open offer that I could go and stay with him and his family if I ever needed it, and oh boy did I need it. I was suicidally depressed and a big danger to myself. Camden council had been supremely unhelpful to a resident who they owed a legal duty of care, but they didn't give a shit whether I lived or died.

I guess a lot of unimaginative runaways go to London, and a huge proportion of them will end up in Camden Town. Camden is cool, undoubtably. Camden is full of wide-eyed young people, tourists, and huge amounts of recreational drugs, casual sex and music venues. It's a great place to spend a summer on a shoestring, smoking strong cannabis and chatting up girls.

I had made a couple of similarly Peter Pan-esque pals in Camden, in their mid thirties and working dead-end jobs on low pay, forced into living in hostels and dreadful squat-like houses with several people sleeping in every room. For me, it was a hugely novel experience, having been a wealthy IT consultant working in banking since I took my first big money contract at the age of 20, for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. After 17 or so years of fabulous wealth, slumming it for a summer was almost fun.

My girlfriend at the time was a waitress at an Italian restaurant. Despite having a degree in economics from the University of Bologna, she had rejected the rat race in favour of a minimum wage job and getting ridiculously stoned every day. She was fun and easy going, just so long as all you wanted to do was sit around while she chain-smoked joints, and have great sex of course.

I wouldn't say I outgrew my circle of friends, because I loved them dearly, but the stresses and demands of my contract at Barclays were not really compatible with the lifestyle of casual labour and the pursuit of recreational drugs. At some point, the worlds were going to collide.

My girlfriend and most of my friends felt that I had arrogantly snubbed them, but in fact I was desperately dependent on our social circle for my wellbeing and happiness. When things all fell apart, I did too. I was devastated by the collapse of my social life, as well as losing the structure and routine of my employment.

I ran away to Ireland, and my friend picked me up from Cork airport and took me back to the little village of Killavullen, that he and his family call home. Nestled in the hillside above the village, looking over the valley below and just at the edge of a vast forest, my friend's family home is a peaceful idyll that is completely unlike the rat race of London.

The timing was not ideal, and I arrived in the middle of various challenges facing the family, but they welcomed me and treated me with incredible warmth, kindness, care, despite the crises that they were dealing with. It's not my place to be indiscreet about the family matters that I became aware of, but suffice to say the last thing they needed was some sick burnt out heartbroken citydweller suddenly thrust into the mix.

My state of mind collapsed still further, as it became clear that there would be no reconciliation with my former friends: I was a pariah. There was nothing for me back in London, except a certain collapse in my will to live. My friend's family insisted that I should stay with them until I felt fit and well enough to return home. I missed my return flight and didn't book another.

I tried to go along with the flow of family and village life, getting to know the people that my friend grew up with, and his family.

My friend and I went panning for gold - I had bought him a kit while in England and had brought it over to Ireland for him - as well as climbing to the top of the 'mountain' that he lived on. We drove around the vast forest that covered the hillside, and explored the neighbouring villages, as well as nearby Cork city centre. Although I had visited Ireland twice before, I had missed the point about stopping to smell the shamrocks. I'm always in the mode of rush, rush, rush.

We travelled to the huge cliffs at Old Head, and I stood there on the edge, having had a haircut, a shave, a bunch of hot meals and having slept in a warm comfortable bed in a welcoming family home for some time. Instead of wanting to jump off the edge of the cliff, I was actually happy to be alive.

Tags: #friends #homeless #london #ireland #family #suicide #depression #career #banking #computing

This is a story about taking responsibility...

What did you do to get fat, poor, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, mentally ill, bored and unfulfilled in your job and your life, into an abusive relationship, trapped onto benefits or otherwise cornered?

Those who think of themselves as having made smart life choices are quick to criticise those less fortunate than them, believing that the difference between them was simply one of choice.

A fat person simply chose to eat more calories than their energy requirement. If you mostly sit around watching TV, you don't need any more calories than those required to pump the muscle of your heart, move the diaphragm of your lungs, and for your cells to create enough heat to keep your blood at 37 degrees Celsius.

A poor person simply chose to not study very hard at school, and to not seek a lucrative career. If a poor person wants to become richer, there is an established path of acquiring academic qualifications, and then working your way up through the ranks to gain the experience you need to get a better job.

An alcoholic simply chose to not stop drinking before their body entered a state of alcohol dependence syndrome. The first time that you get the shakes after drinking, you could quit and possibly avoid delirium tremens and having a seizure.

A drug addict simply chose to continue to seek whatever escapism and pain numbing they found comforting in their drug of choice. A drug addict could simply choose to live with the pain and issues that they're trying to escape, or kill themselves in a much quicker way.

Mentally ill, stressed, anxious, depressed people simply chose to put themselves into an overwhelming situation that doesn't meet their needs and constantly bombards them with things that they have to do that they can't cope with. A depressed person could simply stop working, draw the curtains closed, and wait to be sacked and evicted onto the streets.

People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not give up on their partner and remain optimistic about things getting resolved, or are simply choosing to be trapped into a cycle of abuse that fills them with so much fear that they feel unable to remove themselves from the situation. People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not run away from the family home with their children, and live where? On the street?

People on benefits are simply choosing to not take a zero hours contract McJob on minimum wage that would see their benefits slashed as well as also having to spend all their paycheque on childcare so that some stranger can raise their kids, who they never get to see anymore because they're at work the whole time. People on benefits are choosing to live on a government handout that is not enough to pay for the basic essentials that they need, and puts them into a hand-to-mouth stressful existence with no hope of escape.

Maybe you could combine all these things, so that somebody is an overweight drunk with a drug habit, depressed, anxious, under-qualified for any decent job, and wedded to both the welfare state and an abusive partner, both of which have their claws into the person such that they can never escape.

Do you think it sounds appealing, the idea of living life without the comfort of food and eating? Life without the simple pleasure of sugary and fatty snacks. Do you think it sounds appealing, being stone cold sober and straight, with absolutely zero chemicals to alter your perception of the world, when your world consists of collecting benefits cheques that disappear like sand running through your fingers, with no hope for any kind of different future? Life without the numbing power of intoxicants, and the brief moments of joy that might be brought by other drugs, in an otherwise bleak and depressing existence.

Imagine having to give up your home, your partner, your family, your chemical crutches, your favourite food, and live in the cold harsh light of a reality of being single, alone, homeless, withdrawing from drugs and alcohol, dealing with depression and anxiety with nothing other than this magical bullshit thing called "willpower" alone.

Yes, it's all very well criticising the poor and unfortunate from your villa in Tuscany or the deck of a yacht. Yes, it's all very well talking about poor life choices, while you sit in your second home counting your money.

The truth of the matter though is this: the difference between successful people and unfortunate ones is pure blind luck.

We don't pick our shitty irresponsible lazy parents. We don't pick how wealthy our family is. We don't pick our schools. We don't pick whether we will have academic aptitude or not. We don't pick whether we can apply ourselves to the task of getting a lucrative job, or whether we hold onto unrealistic fantasies of becoming a pop singer or a Premiership footballer for far too long, before reality finally dawns on us. We don't pick whether we get to throw ourselves into our careers, our homes, our families, our pets, our hobbies... or whether we end up running to the bottle, the pills, the powders and the needle, in order to deal with the extraordinary shitness of daily existence.

Life is short. Life is shit. If your life is not shit, you're in no position to tell other people that it's because they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid and they made bad life choices. If your life is not shit, it's because you were lucky enough to be born into a family of reasonable wealth and education. You were lucky enough to fall into something that was lucky enough to work out. Yes, you made choices, but there was a huge component of luck that it worked out. Plenty of people made the same choices as you, but through no fault of their own, things didn't work out well for them.

In the blink of an eye, you can have an accident that will have life-changing consequences. In the blink of an eye, your one golden opportunity can pass you by, and you'll be shunted off the smooth tarmac and onto the rocky road. In the blink of an eye, your fortunes can change, and you find yourself cast into the seething mass of humanity, all crawling over each other like crabs in a bucket, trying to escape.

Just because you were lucky enough to make your escape, doesn't mean that anybody else can follow your special recipe, doesn't mean that anybody else can find their perfect job, can find fulfilment, contentment. Just remember: one slip and you're just as fucked as all the other people who weren't lucky like you were.

One slip and you're fucked.

Tags: #politics #homeless #abuse #alcohol #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth #depression

This is a story about brainwashing...

How do you think that somebody who has worked for the best part of 20 years in the investment banking technology sector, mostly as an IT consultant, would re-adjust to being under lock and key in a psychiatric hospital? The answer is: very easily.

Hospitals and the NHS are a home from home for anybody who's worked for an organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees. The ways that large organisations function are largely the same. The way that systems and processes are supposed to control large numbers of people, are nearly identical.

Being in the loony bin was welcome relief from the bullshit day job, but it's not like I had absented myself from all responsibilities. I still had to have my wits about me to avoid being medicated against my will and put under a 'section' - involuntary commitment to a secure facility, by rule of law - which could have seen my 2 week voluntary stay extended anywhere from 28 days to 6 months.

How did I manage it so easily? Perhaps it's because I knew I could leave any time I wanted to, but perhaps it could be because nearly 20 years of going to a shit office to do a shit job, has kinda prepared me for the monotony, rhythm and routine of spending weeks on end trapped somewhere I don't want to be.

There was a danger that just the very act of asking to leave could have triggered the doctors to decide to force me to stay longer. I knew that I had to remain calm, and give the medical team  enough of a peek at my psyche to be able to make a judgement that I was safe to release back into the wilderness.

The psychiatrist who took me under his care was in two minds, after 6 days, whether he was going to insist on 'committing' me, so that he'd get 28 or so days to poke around inside my head. Naturally, most people would freak out, if they found out that their liberty was about to be taken away from them. It's a game of brinksmanship: who's going to blink first.

Obviously, we don't 'commit' people any more to asylums. Instead we detain them under a section of the Mental Health Act, and put them in secure psychiatric facilities. You're no longer a loony in the loony bin. You're a "service user" in a "care facility". Of course, I'm not saying that the function is not useful or should not be trusted. I'm just pointing out that the names of things have been changed.

Bizarrely, if you say "I'm going to kill myself, I need to be locked up" you are very unlikely to be locked up. If you walk up to the hospital reception desk and use their phone to contact the switchboard, ask to be connected to the bleep holder for Psychiatric Liaison, and explain frankly your situation, you will have an amusing conversation with the poor Psychiatrist who has to follow official channels, but you're not going to get anywhere. The times that I have been admitted as an inpatient to a psychiatric facility, it has just taken time & patience. Only the truly desperate will sit in Accident & Emergency for 13 hours just patiently waiting for help.

Conversely, if you say "I'm not mad, I'm fine" once you're in the system, or in any way try to rush the process along, you're going to end up held down on the floor with somebody injecting Risperidone and Haloperidol in you, and you might wake up 40 years later, shuffling around the corridors of some institution, with the marked side effects of powerful psychiatric drugs causing you to make involuntary facial movements.

You can't fight the system. You can't fight the frustrating fact that you'll never get ahead in life and must instead sit at a desk keeping a seat warm, just so that your boss can appoint somebody from outside the company to come in and be incompetent at the job you were hoping to be promoted into, even though you were experienced and qualified to do it. You can't fight the frustrating fact that your miserable boring existence, helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, is making you pretty depressed, and you really want to fuck everything off and watch everything burn down.

Who is mad and who is sane? That doctor who just declared you to be mentally ill probably talks to their imaginary friend called Dob or Gob or Dog or Dod (or is it God?) who really knows? There's no proof that their imaginary friend exists, just like the doctor has no proof that the voices you hear aren't real and you aren't actually the Son of Dob, resurrected on Earth.

The invisible line between sane and insane is very blurry, when billions of people genuinely believe in magic, invisible entities that don't exist, and have absolute faith that some children's fairy tales are actually instructions that should be devoutly and literally followed to the letter as some kind of prescription for life.

It seems highly irreverent to say it, but people need to speak up, because the loonies are actually in charge of the asylum, when we elect and hand over power to people who believe in their invisible friends, fairy tales and magic.

By the way, for the record, I don't hear voices and I don't think I'm Jesus. But then, saying that kinda makes me sound a bit mad, doesn't it?

Tags: #mentalhealth #nhs #hospital #suicide #depression #religion #politics

This is a story about having too much of a good thing...

Pills, pills, pills. A pill for every ill. We have so much faith in modern medicine at the moment, that we have medicalised boredom, depression, stress, when clearly these are as much a product of our environment, as they are a sign of anything pathological.

The very process of going to your doctor and getting sent away with some unnecessary pills, is well known to have a placebo effect. With the Internet and the possibility of self-diagnosis, we have turned into a society of hypochondriacs, who attribute every tiny discomfort to symptoms that require medical attention.

We have now overprescribed to the point that we have super-resistant strains of bacteria that can't be killed even with our last-line-of-defence antibiotics. Going running to your doctor because you've got a cough or a cold, and being fobbed off with magic beans that you believe can cure your viral infection, is just downright stupid, and now it's biting our arse.

It's the same thing with antidepressants. Because over 60% of us hate our boring stupid stressful crap jobs, we've been dishing our psychiatric medications like they're sweets. Over 60 million antidepressant prescriptions got written last year in the UK. That's enough for every man, woman and child in the whole country.

The number of people taking antidepressant medication for their clinical depression has doubled in a decade. There is a mental health epidemic that is driving so many other antisocial trends: alcoholism, drug abuse, isolation and loneliness, insecurity and anxiety, loss of productivity, loss of motivation, loss of drive to exercise and socialise.

What are you going to do if you work some dreadful zero hours contract for rock bottom wages and can barely make ends meet? What are you going to do if there's no hope of you getting on the housing ladder, or escaping from the financial situation you find yourself trapped in?

Of course people are going to turn to drink & drugs, to try to numb themselves from the painful monotony of working as hard as you can but never getting ahead. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for so many people. You just work, and then you die. None of your dreams will ever come to fruition. None of your hopes will ever be realised.

There's a disrespect for addicts and alcoholics, like they're taking the easy way out. Because there is supposed to be instant gratification in a pill, powder or liquid that contains psychoactive substances - uppers & downers - then it doesn't seem as worthy as those who physically toil for their fix of endorphins. However, how many 'legitimate' routes to happiness are there in the world, really?

There used to be a formula: get married, buy a house, have some kids, die. The first 3 you can't really do anymore, without cash handouts from the bank of Mum & Dad and/or the state. Who can really afford the lavish wedding that society expects us to have? Who can afford the deposit on some crappy tiny little flat, and afford the mortgage repayments, when you earn barely enough to survive? Who can afford childcare and all the other associated costs of childrearing, when you already don't have any disposable income?

All the hard work, industriousness, austerity, careful financial planning, saving, budgeting and diligent application of yourself to furthering your career, is likely to result in what? Maybe a few percentage points of a pay rise, if you're really lucky. Are you going to get promoted? Are you fuck. They're going to promote somebody incompetent and lazy, because they're older and they've been with the company for longer. Merit and hard work will get you nowhere.

So, pretty soon, you're going to get tired & depressed about it all. You tried hard at school. You turned up for your exams and gave it your best shot. You stressed yourself out and went to those interviews and got that job, and you worked your hardest, day after day, even though you could sense it was all utter bullshit by now. And for what? Where are you? What have you achieved? What are you ever going to achieve?

The enormity of it all hits you: you were sold a lie. You can't be anything you want to be. You're not special. You're not unique. You're not different. We're all just so much meat in the mincer. Turn the handle and out comes yet another drone just like you; prepared to do the shittest, most mind-numbingly boring and pointless work imaginable, for a salary that doesn't even buy you the basic essentials in life.

Why wouldn't you go running to the doctor, and ask them to dope you up to the eyeballs, so you don't have to live with the crushing realisation of the pointlessness of it all anymore? Why wouldn't you need happy pills, when you realise that the only way you're ever going to get the things that you were promised that hard work would bring, is by being given a council house or a cash lump sum from your parents. The only way you're going to ever be self sufficient is if Mum & Dad or the state top up your income... like you're some sort of fucking charity case... going around with your begging bowl.

How undignified. What an affront to human dignity it all is. Our parents and grandparents proudly tell us that they're "self made". They make loud proclamations that "nobody ever gave me a handout. I worked hard and I earned my keep". How shameful it is that we're twice as smart and work twice as hard, but we have nothing to show for it, except for a sneering generation telling us that exams are getting easier and that we're lazy and stupid.

Crippling debt and the crippling shame of not being able to live independently, not being able to be self sufficient and feel like we too are earning our money and contributing to the growth and wealth of the nation. It's all so crippling, so debilitating. Of course we need to turn to medications, drink and drugs.

You think it's about having a good time? Happy pills, and lashings of beer & wine? You think people wouldn't rather be happy by natural means, because they're fulfilled by normal things in their life: walking the dog, kissing their kids goodnight and paying the mortgage on their own home?

Antidepressants are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. We have attempted to cover up the steady decline in the standard of living of young people, and mask the problem using happy pills, but the soaring suicide rates are just the tip of the iceberg.

Unless we face up to the reality that those who are suffering from many mental illnesses are the canary in the coal mine, we will reach a crisis point where most of the population are unable or unwilling to continue to maintain the status quo.

The mental health epidemic is the true breaking point, not immigration.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #depression #politics #capitalism

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about ethics...

Imagine if you or I got caught laundering the best part of a billion dollars worth of drug money. We'd get sent to jail for a very long time, right? What if a bank got caught doing it, and there was so much evidence that there was clearly a case for criminal wrongdoing that could be prosecuted? Well, maybe you'd get given a chance to get rid of some of your dodgy customers, and nobody would go to jail. Does that sound fair?

Let's think about the financial crisis of 2007/08, when reckless trading meant that the whole banking sector had to be bailed out, causing austerity for ordinary hardworking people. The people who have paid the highest price - with lower wages, job insecurity and cutbacks for frontline services - would never be able to go begging for interest free loans if they behaved so irresponsibly.

Bankruptcy is not a criminal offence. It's OK for a private citizen to run up huge debts, find out they could never hope to possibly repay their creditors, and declare bankruptcy. You don't go to jail for bankruptcy.

So, arguably, what the banks did in 2007/08 wasn't that bad. It wasn't criminal. They had their risk underwritten by governments, so why wouldn't they take huge risks with public money? They were economically incentivised to take those risks, because the precedent of the "too big to fail" bailouts meant that there was no downside risk.

But what about money laundering? What about facilitating payments for drug gangs, dealers, traffickers? If you or I were involved in any of that as a private citizen, the courts would throw the book at us. They'd lock us up and throw away the key. It's criminal.

So, what about the banks? If the biggest bank in Europe - HSBC - was well known to authorities for helping a couple of major drug gangs to launder the best part of a billion dollars in dirty money, wouldn't that be criminal too? Wouldn't people go to jail?

Well, no. Enter the concept of "too big to jail". Just like the financial bailouts that the banks received, banks can also receive Deferred Prosecution Agreements. That is to say, even though you got caught doing criminal stuff, you'll get let off so long as you take some steps to stop doing it in future.

And how long would you have to get rid of your dodgy customers? Well, say the US Department of Justice were thinking about prosecuting you in 2012, you might still be botching the IT project that is apparently 'essential' to get rid of your dodgy customers 4 years later... in 2016.

How much do HSBC really know about their customers anyway? Well, from their electronic records that they already have on file, they know about 6% of what they need to know. So basically, they don't know 94% of what they need to know.

Now, you might not be an IT project management expert, but you'd have thought that it's more important to find out the missing 94% of what you don't know, than even to bother with the 6% that you do know. Sure, it's pretty embarrassing to have to ask your customers where they live again, but what you really need to know is this: where did you get your fucking money?

In Customer Due Diligence terms, this is called Source of Wealth. You might have inherited the money (legit), you might have won the lottery (legit), you might have sold a priceless artwork (legit) and you might have trafficked vast quantities of illegal narcotics (not legit). Basically, HSBC had 4 years to ask all their customers "is your source of wealth drug money?". Did they manage this? No.

I'm quite spectacularly offended by just how badly they botched a simple project to ask all their customers to fess up: are you in the illegal drugs business?

Sure, it's true that HSBC had to cough up a couple of billion dollars in fines, but for them that's just the cost of doing business. Their profitability was barely affected.

Arguments were made to the US to defer prosecution, and to allow HSBC to keep its banking charter and continue to do business in the United States. These arguments were made on the basis of maintaining stability in the financial markets. The Deferred Prosecution Agreement came with stringent terms, that a court would appoint a Monitor to make sure that HSBC actually cleaned up their act. I can tell you now, Michael Cherkasky, that the project to clean up HSBC's customer base was a total sham. A shambolic waste of time & money, mismanaged to the point that the whole thing was laughable.

Do you think that message that is sent to "too big to fail" organisations, that they're above the law and they can never go bankrupt because they'll always be bailed out, is looking like the right one, today, now, in 2016?

The argument that has been made is that we need to prop up the share prices so that the pension funds are protected, and we need to maintain financial stability. Isn't that just utter bullshit, in the face of austerity and extreme volatility in the markets? We've had round after round of Quantitative Easing (QE) and other attempts to breathe life into markets that have lost their minds. There is nothing at all rational or efficient about the global markets that we see today.

And to round it all off, it's corrupt as hell. To allow banks to ride roughshod over the rule of law is the final step in handing over the nations of the world to the multinational corporations who have driven us into a position of financial ruin, much to the pain of the vast majority of ordinary working people. It stinks of the worst corruption ever perpetrated on Western civilisation, does it not?

Somebody has to call time on the lack of ethics and accountability for the too big to fail organisations, and their board members who are too big to jail.

When we allow the likes of Stuart Gulliver to be the CEO of HSBC, when he doesn't even keep his wealth in the bank he manages, but instead keeps it hidden in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, clearly we have corruption right from the top down.

David Cameron, outgoing Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said, as recently as April, that "[I] can't point to every source of every bit of [my] money" but yet we would have the likes of you or I have to prove that our filthy lucre was not ill-gotten gains from some criminal enterprise. The corruption comes from the very top of both Government and organisations. It stinks.

Who is going to grasp the nettle and hold Government and large enterprise to account for having run us into economic ruin, while busily siphoning wealth offshore?

There needs to be accountability. There needs to be jail time for corrupt executives and government ministers.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #hsbc #politics

This is a story about counterintuitive results...

Conventional wisdom tells us that sobriety is the route to salvation. If you're being treated for substance dependency, most approaches are abstinence-based. But what if these approaches are totally wrong?

I had 'too much' to drink last night, but yet this morning I was on time to work for the first time in ages. I was also on top form during a 2 hour meeting that was highly pressured and intense. Clearly my work performance, my productivity, was improved by alcohol, rather than hindered.

Alcohol works for me as a substance that I can titrate the dose of to control my mood fluctuations. When I quit drinking last year, my anxiety levels became unbearable after 30 days sober, and I had to go into hospital and be on suicide watch. I then went hypomanic and quit a well paid job, and did a bunch of other mad shit, before finally relapsing onto hard drugs and slashing my forearms with a razor blade, after 101 days sober. Hardly an encouraging result.

The fact of the matter is: my job is boring and shit. My life is empty, unfulfilling and stressful. Of course I need something to help me cope with an intolerable daily existence. How the hell am I supposed to get through the crap I'm going through without a chemical crutch.

Just about everybody you know has some kind of substance that they depend upon to cope with modern life. Maybe it's antidepressants, sleeping pills, tranquillisers, opiates. Maybe it's cigarettes, tea, coffee, coca-cola, Red Bull, beer, wine, spirits. Maybe it's cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, MDMA, GHB, M-CAT or any one of the myriad other legal and illegal drugs. Humans love drugs.

Clearly, I know what my 'drug of choice' is, and I know that there's no way that I can use it in moderation. Thankfully, alcohol is not something that I've struggled to live without, except where life choices that are forced upon me - such as having to work a shitty job - demand that I find some kind of coping mechanism.

I don't have any kids or pets, so I get no natural endorphins. I don't have any time or money to pursue sports or go to the gym, so I get no natural endorphins and adrenalin boosts. My job is dull as ditch water, so I don't even get any kind of thrill from my work.

But, good news! I've found a formula that worked for me for years & years & years & years: self-medication with alcohol.

Yes! Hurrah for alcohol. It kept the lid on my hypomanic episodes for years.

Basically, the reality that we must all face up to, is that modern life is so fucking shit that we've all got to be drugged up and drunk to get through it.

I could get my cat back from my parents, and get some plants to water and care for. I can soon get a car and some new kites, and go and get my adrenalin and endorphin fix at the beach. However, without those things, I'm forced into puting chemicals into my body, to allow me to keep my shitty job and keep functioning in this crazy society that values corporate profits more than mental health.

My life really sucks, but I'd rather drink a few bottles of wine and keep my highly lucrative contract, so I can escape the rat race at some point, rather than have another repeat of last year's failed experiment.

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #suicide #hospital